Walk the Stone Arch Bridge this week and the crossing feels ordinary again. Runners cut across at dawn, cyclists lean into the curve toward St. Anthony Main, and the sightline down to St. Anthony Falls opens up the way it always has. That normalcy is recent. For sixteen months, that same stretch of the Mississippi was a bridge to nowhere, closed in sections so crews could repoint mortar and replace stone on a structure built in the 1880s for James J. Hill's railroad. It came back faster than anyone promised.
The building at the foot of that bridge did not.
Water Works Pavilion sits where the bridge meets the west bank, inside Mill Ruins Park, on the site where the state's first Japanese restaurant, Fuji Ya, once stood. For four years it held one of the city's most decorated restaurants, Owamni by The Sioux Chef. That restaurant is gone now, mid-move to a new address, and its replacement was still finishing construction as of the most recent public update. Two projects, same corner of the riverfront, moving at opposite speeds. That mismatch is the actual story of the riverfront right now, and it explains something a quick walk across the bridge won't tell you on its own: why the crossing feels finished while the destination at the end of it still doesn't.
The Bridge That Beat Its Own Deadline
The Stone Arch Bridge closed to full pedestrian and bike traffic in April 2024 for a $38.5 million repair, the first work done on the span since it was converted from rail to pedestrian use in the 1990s. Crews worked one half of the bridge at a time, letting people walk or bike to the midpoint and turn around, then swapping sides. The original plan called for two years of that, with full reopening expected by spring 2026.
By late 2024, the Minnesota Department of Transportation had tightened that estimate, telling residents the entire bridge would reopen by fall 2025. Then it beat that revised number too. The full crossing reopened August 9, 2025, an event MnDOT and Governor Tim Walz's office both described as nearly three months ahead of schedule. The celebration ran on both ends of the bridge at once, at Father Hennepin Bluff Park on the St. Anthony Main side and downtown, with a ribbon cutting and a walk across timed to the reopening. One nearby resident, interviewed by a local TV crew that day, said the crossing had been part of his routine for years and that getting it back felt overdue in the best way.
So the public infrastructure project, the kind of work that usually runs long, finished early. That's the baseline. Now compare it to what happened next door.
Owamni Left on Schedule. Its Replacement Didn't Arrive on Time.
Owamni was never going to stay at Water Works forever. Chef Sean Sherman's restaurant, which won a James Beard Award and helped put the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board's riverfront redevelopment on a national stage, announced last fall it would relocate to the Guthrie Theater. That move happened on its own clean timeline. Owamni served its final dinner at Water Works on April 30, 2026, held a closing cookout on May 2, and reopened inside the Guthrie under a new name, Indígena by Owamni, with a soft opening June 23 and a grand opening July 4. Two and a half months from last service to grand reopening, no slippage reported.
That left the Water Works Pavilion, a two-story, roughly 7,800-square-foot building that's part of the Park Board's RiverFirst initiative, without a tenant. MPRB issued a request for proposals in December, reviewed submissions through the winter, and in April announced the winner: Arch and River, a new concept from Diane Moukouri and chef Fritz Ebanda, the husband-and-wife team behind B'beri Desserts, a pastry shop that built its following at area farmers markets before opening a full-time location inside the Alliance Française building. Their pitch beat out several competing proposals for the space. The Park Board's commissioners took up a five-year concessions agreement, running through 2031, at their April 29 meeting.
The concept itself is specific: French bistronomie with an Afro-Caribbean twist, an all-day menu that starts with coffee and pastries in the morning, moves through brunch, lunch and a goûter in the afternoon, and closes with dinner and what the owners call a dessert bar experience at night. Beer, cider and wine, served inside the pavilion or out on the riverside patio.
The opening date is where the timeline stopped cooperating. April's announcement pointed to a summer 2026 opening. By early August, Park Board representatives told Axios the target had shifted to September. As of this writing, no firm date has been made public, and the pavilion's dining room has not yet opened to the public.
Why the Gap Matters More Than Either Fact Alone
Neither of these facts is unusual by itself. Bridge repairs sometimes finish early. Restaurant buildouts, especially ones with an open-kitchen concept inside uncovered mill ruins, sometimes take longer than a press release suggests. What's worth noticing is that they're happening at the exact same address, on opposite trajectories, in the same twelve-month window.
For anyone who treats the Stone Arch Bridge as part of a daily route, that gap is the difference between a walk that feels complete and one that feels like it's missing its last beat. The crossing works. The falls are visible from the same spot they always have been. But the building that's supposed to be the reason you linger at the west end, rather than just pass through, is still behind construction glass.
A short timeline makes the asymmetry easier to hold in your head:
- April 2024: Stone Arch Bridge closes for repair, two-year timeline announced.
- Fall 2025 (revised target): MnDOT tells residents the full bridge will reopen by this point.
- August 9, 2025: Bridge reopens completely, months ahead of the original plan.
- Fall 2025: Owamni announces its move to the Guthrie Theater.
- April 2026: Arch and River selected to take over Water Works Pavilion, five-year deal proposed.
- April 30 to May 2, 2026: Owamni's last service and closing party at Water Works.
- June 23 to July 4, 2026: Indígena by Owamni soft opens, then formally opens, at the Guthrie.
- August 2026: Arch and River's opening slips from "summer" to a September target.
Laid out that way, the bridge and the restaurant stop looking like two unrelated updates and start looking like a single, useful fact: the public half of this riverfront corner is done ahead of schedule, and the private half is still catching up. If you're planning a fall walk that ends at Water Works expecting a full menu and an open patio, check before you go. If you're just there for the view and the crossing itself, nothing about the bridge is holding you back anymore.
What's Actually Open Right Now
While Arch and River finishes its buildout, the rest of the corridor between the bridge and Mill City Museum keeps functioning the way it has for years. Mill City Museum, built inside the ruins of what was once the world's largest flour mill, still runs its rooftop observation deck with the same sightline down to the falls and the bridge that Arch and River's second-floor dining room will eventually share. The Mississippi National River and Recreation Area trails on both banks are open in full, no detours required for the first time since spring 2024. And the broader Mill District calendar keeps moving regardless of any one restaurant's opening date, including Dinner du Nord's return to Nicollet Mall on September 10, part of the same late-summer stretch of programming that's kept the riverfront busy even with one storefront still dark.
None of this requires waiting on anyone. The bridge is the finished part of the story. What comes next at its foot is worth watching, but it's not the reason to go back this fall.
If you already call this stretch of the river home, you don't need us to tell you where to walk. But if you're the kind of person who notices when a neighborhood's rhythm shifts, and you're curious what else is changing along the water this season, that's exactly the kind of local read the Hays Baker Team puts together for clients before they ever ask about a listing. Begin your curated real estate experience whenever you're ready to talk about what's next.